As the purpose of the exercise was to create tile pieces to cover the school’s patio floor, we decide to create an image concept to represent what we think is the essence of the school and the advance architecture at Iaac: The students.

That’s why we decide to create “Topography Faces”, a trilateral symmetry design that represent thinkers of the new architecture.

With 3 diferentes face designs in 3 different corners of the tile, the design becomes a complex pattern formed by the rotation of the title to match with the next face and finally forming a topographical surface for water flow.

Chameleon Tile

Сlick to see the process!

Our inspiration is simple, since we are in the city of Gaudi, we chose one famous work of Gaudi in Parc Guell : the Chameleon.
And because of the shape of the tile we are going to make is in hexagon,
we tried to achieve a design that comprised of continuous lines and shape, for the tile to be able to rotate to connect with another around.

The design process started with mirroring, rotating, and tracing the above picture to create a circle-like, head to tail, chameleons badge.
Then we used a plug-in called “pointreconstruction” in Rhino to give the triangular texture throughout the design.
The plug-in easily grasped the corners and edge of the Chameleon and create “Delaunay” out of it.
(The process of altering the height of each vertices is very manual and we hope we had more time to study the easier way of doing this)
Anyways, we finished off the design by connecting those water channels in the mold with our branches behind our stars.

The RhinoCam process finally finished .
Then came the job of the milling machine. The mold was done with foam block and consumed about half and hour time each.
We brushed the inside of the mold with thin layer of vaseline. Mixed the concrete. Poured it into the mold.
Shake. Get rid of the bubbles.
Waited for 8 hours to dry (very depending on the temperature and the weather)
Gently twisted the mold and the tile came off easily.
All these processes were very time consuming and we need to work well as a team.
The milling machine also needs a very precise and correct type of strategy.
We also learnt that the concrete work is not easy.
It turned out to be a very delicate work compare to the work on computer.

The Lotus Flower it’s a kinetic and dynamic structure.

The goal of the exercise was to producing 3d printed pieces and explore the design opportunities arising from the potential and limitations of the technology to create a dynamic assembly with 2mm diameter rods linked together by 3d printed pieces.

Our idea was to design just one joint. This joint should had the capabilities of generate through the connections between themselves and with the help of the elastic nature of the tubes in order to form two geometrical moments, one that’s goes up and another one than goes to the sides.

The dynamic nature of the joint allows a level of movement between the rods themselves in a translation system by moving the rods in to a circle to move within itself and transfigure into a bigger or smaller structure.

Digital Fabrication – Exercise 3D Printing

Group 22: Gökhan Çatıkkaş, Juhi Patel, Sebastian Alvarado

The project consists of simple joints and their response to the stored energy inside the rods. Playful. The rods stay in form with the already stored energy and if you touch and release the energy it “explodes”.

The explosion does not make the installation irregular, but it makes it back to its ordinary geometric form. This explosion does not mean destruction and irregularity, it brings silence and order to the geometry.

The design of our tower was driven by several criteria: || maximization of material usage
|| repetition of a single member
|| achieving of several possible configurations

As a result of a successful implementation of the first and the second criteria, we were able to make use of 97% of the available material, consequently reaching the height of nearly 5 meters in the virtual model simulation. Nevertheless, the height of the virtual model was modeled in the “perfect world” conditions, thus not reflecting such important physical criteria as material stress capabilities and the vertical load distribution in a structure of this type. Having assembled several sections of the tower into their envisioned arrangement, we confirmed that such material as wood fails in direct correlation with the grain its cut along and the amount of stress it experiences in the thinnest joinery areas. We realized that in order to reduce the stress||strain loads in our tower we need to drastically reduce the total height of the structure and hence tackle the third design criteria, multiple configurations using a repetitive single element.

The base unit of the structure is a slightly curved uniform strip of wood that interlocks with two more identical elements to form a stiff, yet elegant triangle. Further mirrored upwards the newly formed two triangles visually mimic an “expanded metal” element, and are connected via cross-joints in the center and longitudinal joint at the vertices of the triangle. Once unified into one and rotated 30 degrees the units begin locking into each other, thus reinforcing the overall structure of the tower. Lastly, to break the uniform look of the structure we introduced the “turning torso” movement, physically rotating one third of the overall tower height by 15 degrees at each joint.

95 % use of material

Top View

Assembling pieces to form a triangle || 2 triangle form one unit || 2 units joined by cross joints

Scale Comparison

STOPMOTION

Our main idea is to explore the potentiality and limitations that the material could achieve, through theoretical study and various practical tests.

We enclose our research in 5 key points that have helped us to work with a scientific method through this research:
1. FLEXURE – TORSION
2. HEIGHT
3. TAPERING
4. STRIPES
5. ZIPPER
We decided to follow the angle connection (zip tensile forces) after searching and tried different types of joints and cuts in order to obtain different movements and stiffness.
Using 3D models we designed the general form of our tower, trying to push it to the maximum limit towards the research of materiality through the form.
After creating different models, we chose the best one that could answer to our research; we proceeded to the drawing of the flat surfaces and the design of the differents base and height connections.